Abstract
The last steps of religious evolution before the emergence of historic religions occurred in the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic. Central places of worship appeared, then agricultural, socially stratified communities (Neolithic revolution) and urban societies. Archeological discoveries document various prehistoric funeral cultures from this period. The first evolutionary steps toward human religion, on the other hand, could already have occurred (according to several authors) during the history of the chronospecies Homo erectus. Some propose that even the extant Hominidae show traces of proto-religious behavior. Yet the most plausible indications of religious concepts outside Homo sapiens issue from the classical Neanderthals. In any case, hominin evolution towards behavioral modernity gave rise to religious behavior, either as a functional part, or as a nonfunctional epiphenomenon, or both at different stages of evolution. Modernization was an overarching adaptation to (almost) any social or environmental challenge. If religion evolved as its integral result, its evolution was not driven by one, or even by a few, adaptive functions, but by its co-adaptive role in modernization in general.
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Hemminger, H. (2021). The Beginning and the End: Pre-Human and Neolithic Religion. In: Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70408-7_9
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